Sunday, 9 December 2012

GEORGE HIGGINS' EASIEST THING IN THE WORLD: THE SHOTS COLUMN

NOTE: This review originally appeared as number 7 of my short-lived column 'American Eye' forShots Ezine. It was short-lived in part because I had trouble with the deadlines, as the openng sentence reminds me. Re-reading it in light of the preceding IT post on Killing Them Softly makes me think it might be time torevive it.

There’s
a reason why September’s American Eye is late. It is because I was
reading with one American eye shut, knowing that when I finished this
collection of George V Higgins’ ‘uncollected’ short fiction,
there would be nothing else of Higgins left for me to read for the
first time. Not that the prospect of revisiting the work of the
writer I consider the best and most original voice in crime fiction
between Richard Stark and James Ellroy is depressing. But the idea
that Higgins had some untold tales I will now forever miss just
mightbe.

I say ‘uncollected’ because in fact, Higgins
published a short-story collection, The Sins Of Our Fathers, in this
country, and three of the tales included here were also in that book.
That’s not a problem, really, although the editor of this volume,
the prolific Matthew J Bruccoli, doesn’t appear to have done much
actual editing: the book is littered with literals which detract from
the overall appeal. There is, however, a nice, though short,
introductory fond memory by Robert B Parker, who says that, like
himself, as his career progressed, he grew more fond of writing about
the characters, wherever that took him.

It’s true. Higgins
appeal seemed to fade consistently, after The Friends Of Eddie
Coyle,in
part because it was
such an incredible debut novel. But I think there was another paradox
at work here: because the better his later work got, the more out of
step with the times it became. In The Mandeville Talent, for example,
he addressed the problem directly, with a detective character who, in
effect, takes a yuppie couple under his wing and teaches them about
the ways of the world. Because that was what his books were always
about, the way of the world, the way it worked, the way things fitted
together, or at least the way it used to work. Actually, it might be
better to phrase that, the way we think it used to, because my
impression is that, deep down, it still does work in a clockwork of
give and take, of favours granted and withheld, of petty corruptions:
palm greasing and back-rubbing, and it’s just the outward
appearance which has been changed by the children of Higgins’
generation, our yuppie Thatcherite laissez-faire society, or maybe
it’s that the behind the scenes graft has been taken over by a
newly empowered apparatchik class.

Higgins didn’t like this,
and it shows in this collection. The most important, and interesting
stories, are billed as two novellettes, though the first, the title
story of the book, is actually a short-story; but at least neither of
them actually has been collected before. The title story
comes with a separate prequel, a very short coda, as it were. It’s
about the roles of men and women in society as much as anything to do
with crime, and what makes it particularly interesting is the way
Higgins experiments with the passage of time, not the easiest thing
to do when you are telling the story mostly in dialogue. So
conversations sometimes segue from one period to another, seamlessly,
to the point where you’renot even sure where you are until you check.

The
second story, which actually is a novellette, or maybe a novella, who
cares? is called ‘Slowly Now The Dancer’,and if that perhaps
suggests Anthony Powell and time, well, the time part of the
suggestion is accurate. Again, Higgins plays with time, but in this
piece time itself takes the place of his usual story-telling
technique: there is far more narration than you’d expect, far fewer
of the line-ups of quotation marks (inverted commas) signifying that
someone is telling you their recollection of a statement made by a
third person to a fourth as recollected by a fifth to your original
story-teller. Instead, Higgins’ narrative slips and slides
between periods of time, as a Boston son returns to his family home
in Vermont, and basically takes you through almost a century’s
worth of changing social fabric along the way. You can see why the
story never sold; as Prof. Bruccoli says in an editor’s note, only
John O’Hara could sell such things. He doesn’t mention that even
for O’Hara, such stories were often a hard sell, and that was a good while before Higgins. It’s not a
crime story at all, yet I can’t help but feel any fan of Higgins’
crime fiction, and how can you not be?, would love it.

‘Old
Earl Died Pulling Traps’ isn’t really a crime story either; it is
about lawyers, though, who are ipso facto criminals, and it’s another tale of changing mores, taking us through a couple of
generations of a small town, and a few people, and how they interact
while conducting the business of their lives. For lawyers, lives are
business to be conducted, and Higgins’ realisation of this is really the
bedrock of all his fiction. It was published as a limited edition
chapbook. ‘The Last Wash Of The Teapot’ is similar, again no
crime involved, only a lawyer’s resolution of two people’s lives
after one of them loses her spouse. It’s presented as a
draft for a narrative play, a Hal Holbrook-type recital on stage, but
it works on the page in the same way that Higgins’ storytellers
have always worked on the page.

Some of these stories are
slight. Higgins had a fondness for shaggy-dog stories; maybe there
was a touch of O. Henry about him. A couple of his novels are really
just extended shaggy dog stories, and unsatisfying as a result, but
in the short story format you can get away with it. The three
Donnelly stories are like that, but none the worse for it, and
‘Landmark Theatre May Shut Down’ actually surprised me by being,
in the end, a subtle variation on the shaggy-dog theme.

In
some of these stories Higgins is also writing as a New Englander,
not, as in most of his novels, as a Bostonian. One difference is that
the New Englander has a finer sense of the history of the place, and
the people who make up that history. This was, to some extent, what
The Mandeville Talent was concerned with, and why so much of it was
set outside Boston. The other difference is that the world of urban
crime is a Boston thing (and Providence, and Hartford, New Haven,
Bridgeport etc) but not something we associate with little places,
and it is important for Higgins to write his characters in ways that
are not dictated by their (and his) need to indulge in criminal
behaviour. Anti-social, fine.That
New England mentality is a big part of my other favourite of the
stories, ‘The Habits Of The Animals: The Progress Of The Seasons’,
which is really a study of marriage, as told by a character who just
happens to be a state trooper.

He’s a Korean War veteran
(like Parker’s Spenser) and he grew up in the Depression, and
married in an era where sexual mores were different. That the story
is set in a small town near Ossipee, New Hampshire, an area where I
spent many of my childhood summers, makes no difference to my
appreciation of this brilliantly judged piece of writing. It was
reprinted in Best American Short Stories 1973, and for good reason.
But just imagine yourself as Higgins at that point: your crime novel
is a smash, it’s being made into a small classic of a movie, and
this serious story is one of the year’s best. No surprise he never
matched that peak in public acclaim again.

Yet the novels
flowed, and they constitute one of the strongest bodies of work for
any crime novelist. And the stories flowed too. The last one in this
collection, ‘Jack Duggan’s Law’ was chosen by Joyce Carol Oates
for the Best American Mystery Storiescollection a couple of years
ago; it’s one of Higgins’ sleazy lawyer tales, and it is a good
one. There’s an elegiac feeling about the book. His last published
novel was called At End Of Day, and a number of his later novels were
elegiac, almost nostalgic. This collection feels nostalgic too, But
the overall flavour of this book is set out by the story titles.
Beyond those already named, those like ‘An End Of Revels’ and
’Life Was Absolutely Swell’. Not that life WAS necessarily that
swell, but that it was superior, in its way, to what it is now. Or
least it was when George V Higgins was writing about it. He died a
week before his sixtieth birthday. Sometimes, the easiest thing in
the world is hard.

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